bash - Find and remove DOS line endings on Ubuntu

Question

I have found that many of my files have DOS line endings. In VI they look like this: "^M". I don't want to modify files that don't have these DOS line endings. How do I do this using a bash script? Thanks!

EV

Answer 1

grep -URl ^M . | xargs fromdos

grep gets you a list of all files under the current directory that have DOS line endings.

-U makes grep consider line endings instead of stripping them away by default

-R makes it recursive

-l makes it list only the filenames and not the matching lines

then you're piping that list into the converter command (which is fromdos on ubuntu, dos2unix where i come from).

NOTE: don't actually type ^M. instead, you'll need to press <Ctrl-V> then <Ctrl-M> to insert the ^M character and make grep understand what you're going for. or, you could type in $' ' in place of ^M (but i think that may only work for bash...).